Pakistanis are human beings, with a normal range of human worries, charms, foibles, weaknesses, and susceptibilities. This is a working premise and major theme of my own writing and public speaking around the U.S. these days, because I think it’s an important point to bring home to Americans. It’s an obvious point, not subtle or complicated, but challenging to make because of mindsets ingrained by a dozen years and more of war, bad political leadership, and popular culture. And anyway, you can get only so far by insisting on something.

How much more effective it can be to show than to tell is demonstrated by the documentary Without Shepherds, produced and directed by Cary McClelland with Pakistani colleagues. (You can like and follow the film on Facebook.) Beautifully shot and artfully edited, the film follows an assortment of Pakistani individuals in their lives and work and allows them – or rather, asks and invites them – to speak for themselves. The result is a lovingly witnessed and depicted, endearing, and even haunting tapestry of human stories inhabiting the landscapes of Pakistan.

The landscapes, plural, linger in memory as much as the personages, perhaps for me because they quicken nostalgia for my own deeply felt Pakistani experiences. Parts of Pakistan are stunning and lush, of course; much of it is hard, dusty, unlovely, but (to me) deeply lovable and loved. You can’t express such love in words, or really even in pictures. (I do try to express it in words, though, in Alive and Well in Pakistan and in a speech I titled “Why I Love Pakistan.”) It’s what Graham Greene in The Quiet American called “the real background that held you as a smell does”: in Pakistan, it’s the trains and train stations, the highways both flat and mountainous with those wonderful colorful trucks – one of the people the film follows is a long-distance truck driver – the flat-roofed urban neighborhoods, the earth-colored Afghan refugee camps.

The film’s visual portrayal of these slices of Pakistan rings exquisitely true to the country I’ve known and loved for almost two decades. This might be partly due to today’s new super-duper video technologies, but it’s at least equally about the filmmakers’ eye, where they opt to direct their attention and let it linger. What is important and meaningful is always and unavoidably a matter of personal choice and responsibility, and the question – at once artistic and political – is whether we’re going to determine these for ourselves, or let others with vested interests or manipulative agendas decide them for us. For me personally, that’s not a question at all but a fundamental matter of self-respect. True art endorses and amplifies things one already knows or viscerally feels to be true. By that standard, Without Shepherds is true art, a true depiction of the Pakistan that I know and love.

Within the country’s and the film’s landscapes are the voices (mostly in Urdu, with subtitles). Abdullah, the truck driver: “If there’s a traffic jam or a strike, then everyone gets long faces, saying, ‘Where did all the trucks go?’ A driver gets respect when he’s at the wheel. The moment he steps out of his truck, he’s a nobody.” Ibrahim, the earnest young man who, as we learn, became and then ceased being a militant: “It’s our nature to take the things we inherit for granted. That’s why we don’t value Pakistan.” Vaneeza, the businesslike fashion model: “Tidying up is one thing this country will never do.” Laiba, the intrepid Pushtun woman journalist (like so many tough, gutsy Pakistani writers and artists – especially women – that I’ve known): “This country is so plentiful, but we’re just busy fighting each other.” These people have their being amid the perpetual white noise of events, politics, policies decided in Islamabad and Washington. They’re along for the ride, hanging on as best they can, maybe nudging things in one direction or another according to their lights. In this they’re representative not only of Pakistanis, but of all of us.

The personage in the film I haven’t mentioned yet is Imran Khan. We can debate politics later and elsewhere – that’s what long Lahori dinner parties are for – and it’s not for me to say who should govern Pakistan or how. What I will say is that Without Shepherds offers a marvelously intimate portrait of Imran at work and at play: speaking at rallies, mumbling about politics while reading the newspaper, playing pick-up cricket in the mountains, duck hunting with his sons. This film offers delightful and fascinating glimpses of who Imran Khan really is and what he’s about.

I’ve saved mention of Imran until now because I don’t want to leave the impression that Without Shepherds is a film about him. It’s not. But he certainly is part of Pakistan’s story, not only over the past two decades of his long, hard political slog, but of course before that with his career as one of probably the five greatest world cricketers of all time, culminating in one of Pakistan’s great national moments: the 1992 World Cup triumph. It’s part of the triumph of Without Shepherds that it includes his story seamlessly and without pretension among the stories it tells of Pakistan and Pakistanis, and it shows him as much more fully human than the mere “cricketer-turned-politician” that non-Pakistanis read about in news reports.

The film takes its title from Ibrahim, the ex-Taliban: “Sometimes you see animals here without a shepherd,” he tells the filmmakers while showing them around the rocky, scrubby landscape where he used to fight. “We let them roam free. And no matter how far the cows wander, they come home by dusk.” But, except for a couple of charming codas, the last words in the film are Imran’s, appropriately leaving us with things to think about. “Now answer one question,” he tells a rally. “Pakistan ka matlab kya? What is the meaning of Pakistan?”